Spending watchdog launches investigation into Sellafield
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Nationwide Audit Workplace to look at dangers and prices at nuclear waste website in Cumbria
Anna Isaac and Alex Lawson, 16 Feb 24
Britain’s public spending watchdog has launched an investigation into dangers and prices at Sellafield, the UK’s largest nuclear waste dump.
The Nationwide Audit Workplace (NAO), which scrutinises using public funds, has introduced it is going to look at whether or not the Cumbria website is managing and prioritising the dangers and hazards of the positioning successfully in addition to deploying assets appropriately and persevering with to enhance its venture administration.
The findings of its investigation are anticipated to be revealed this autumn.
Sellafield is Europe’s most poisonous nuclear website and likewise one of many UK’s most costly infrastructure tasks, with the NAO estimating it might price £84bn to take care of the positioning into the following century.
Final yr, Nuclear Leaks, a Guardian investigation into actions at Sellafield, revealed issues with cybersecurity, a radioactive leak and a “poisonous” office tradition on the waste dump.
Predictions of the final word invoice for the positioning, which holds about 85% of the UK’s nuclear waste, differ. It price £2.5bn to run the positioning final yr, and the federal government estimates it might in the end take £263bn to handle the nation’s ageing nuclear websites, of which Sellafield accounts for the biggest portion.
The positioning employs about 11,000 individuals and is the world’s largest retailer of plutonium. It contains greater than 1,000 buildings, lots of which weren’t created with the intention of changing into long-term storage amenities for radioactive materials.
Sellafield is so costly that the Workplace for Funds Accountability, which displays threats to the UK authorities’s funds, has warned that it and different legacy websites pose a “materials supply of fiscal danger” to the nation.
The NAO beforehand examined actions at Sellafield in 2018. It discovered some elements of venture administration had improved however that extra wanted to be carried out to get a grip on huge prices and dangers.
Amyas Morse, the top of the NAO at the moment, discovered that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is tasked with administration of Sellafield, wanted to enhance its clarification of its progress in order that parliament might maintain it to account.
This problem was underlined when the Guardian uncovered how a worsening leak from an enormous silo of radioactive waste at Sellafield might pose a danger to the general public.
The leak, from one of many “highest nuclear hazards within the UK” – a decaying constructing often known as the Magnox swarf storage silo – is anticipated to proceed for not less than an additional 30 years. This might have “doubtlessly important penalties” if it gathers tempo, risking the contamination of groundwater, in keeping with an official doc.
This was simply certainly one of a list of security dangers arising from ageing infrastructure on the website. A doc despatched to members of the Sellafield board in November 2022, and seen by the Guardian, raised widespread issues a couple of degradation of security throughout the positioning, warning of the “cumulative danger” from failings starting from nuclear security to asbestos and fireplace requirements.
Responding to the problems late final yr, a Sellafield spokesperson stated: “The character of our website signifies that till we full our mission, our highest hazard amenities will all the time pose a danger.”
Sellafield is owned by the NDA, a quango sponsored and funded by the Division for Vitality Safety and Web Zero that’s tasked with cleansing 17 websites throughout the UK.
The NDA stated it had a “accountability to ship for the general public, together with on worth for cash”.
“We welcome this continued scrutiny and stay up for working with the NAO,” a spokesperson stated.
February 17, 2024 –
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
enterprise and prices, politics, UK
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